Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

When we describe and think about ourselves through a language of disease, and when we seek technical or scientific solutions to our problems, we can lose sight of the social origins of disease and stigma.

Medicalization is itself a product of culture, an ideological position grounded first in the belief that we can separate the body and the mind, and second in the belief that we can separate the mind from the environments in which we live, as if culture is just a bothersome factor that obscures biological realities.

And the very phrase “mental health” is designed to avoid the connotations of sickness. Even the National Institute of Mental Health, the lead federal agency for research on mental illness, does not call itself an institute of mental illness, though most of the other national institutes are named for diseases (e.g., the National Cancer Institute, th

Stigma does not derive from ignorance or lack of knowledge, but rather from the conception of mental illness as the sign of the idle, a personality incapable of achieving the ideal: producing for oneself and the economy.20